Building bridges
Posted 4 August 2010 // Jock Phillips
Building the Grafton Bridge, around 1910
In this time when money is tight and we are urged to think smarter, partnerships are very much in vogue. So Te Ara is happy to point out an interesting partnership we have just implemented with the Living Heritage website. Hosted by the National Library, Living Heritage is a site where school pupils can publish interesting stories about their local community – its history, culture and people.
Last year Living Heritage approached Te Ara with the idea that we could link to some of the stories on their site. We readily agreed. About a third of our users are from schools, so we were keen to strengthen those links. Living Heritage combed Te Ara and drew up suggestions for links, and then I went through all the suggested stories and picked those which really added value for the user. The links are now up on Te Ara in the Further Sources sections of the relevant entries.
There are some great contributions. They include:
- a lovely study of the meaning of tapa to the Tongan community prepared jointly by students in Marcellin College in Auckland and Takuilau College in Tonga
- a well-argued project by students from Hauraki Primary School on the vexed question of whether mangroves are an asset or a pest
- two excellent pieces of local history which we link to from the Otago Places entry giving introductions to Kurow and Maheno
- an interesting story from Wairakei Primary School about the restoration of a famous healing hot pool
- a good introduction to irrigation methods created by pupils at Duntroon School in north Otago
- two fascinating accounts of bridges – the Millers Flat bridge on the Clutha by students at the Millers Flat School, and the unique story of the Ōpiki toll bridge built to service the Manawatū flax industry.
While we are on bridges, you might like to take a look at the interactive on types of bridges, which has been vastly improved by another partnership. As non-engineers, we were keen to find out for ourselves and our users exactly how bridges work. So we analysed the main bridge types in New Zealand and asked a local architect to explain how the loads were carried. However, when the interactive went public, Cameron Smart of IPENZ (the Institution of Professional Engineers) approached us and suggested that we did not have the diagrams quite right. Then followed a series of drafts and discussions until finally the joint endeavour was completed. Cameron was excited; we were pleased; and you can now see the result back on the site.
As the diagrams make clear, building bridges to share the load is never easy; but when it succeeds as in these two examples, the result is well worthwhile.
